Cadbury to shrink family-sized chocolate blocks

Confectionery company Cadbury Australia has announced it will shrink its family-sized 210g/220g chocolate blocks in the coming weeks.

Cadbury Australia said the changes to the size of the block were due to pressure from increased manufacturing costs.

“Confectionery companies around the world are feeling the squeeze of increasing costs,” Cadbury Australia said in a statement. “At Cadbury, we’re feeling it too,” the Company said.

“We’ve reached a point where we can no longer absorb these increasing costs into the price of our chocolate blocks,” Cadbury Australia said. “So we had to make a tough decision: increase the recommended price of Cadbury family blocks, or decrease the size? We chose to keep Cadbury chocolate affordable for families across Australia and reduce our family blocks by one row,” the Company said.

Cadbury said that by making this change, the Company could continue to support local manufacturing in Australia. The Company said it would continue to develop new flavours and products, and that the taste of its chocolate would not change.

Changes in the Cadbury chocolate block size have received considerable attention in previous years. Australian Food News reported in April 2013 that Cadbury had relaunched an ‘enhanced’ version of its Dairy Milk Chocolate block, which included an increase in size from 200g to 220g. The marketing of the size increase received some criticism because the blocks had originally been 250g, prior to a size decrease in 2009.

Australian Food News reported in September 2014 that consumer group CHOICE had used the consumer response to the changing size of Cadbury’s chocolate blocks in 2013 as an example of consumer support for quantity figures to appear on the front of food packaging.